Warehouse Management for Natela Importers

As a leading food distributor in South Africa, Natela Importers built a new distribution center to meet its continued growth. However, managing a high volume of inventory with an outdated inventory management system was having a negative impact on their operations and customer service levels. By implementing an automated warehouse management system (WMS), Natela has decreased their picking costs by nearly 20 percent.

Featured Software Research:

Companies recognize the need to integrate big data into their real-time analytics and operations, but this poses a lot of technical and resource challenges. Meanwhile, those organizations that have operational data stores (ODSs) in place find that, while useful, they are expensive to scale. The ODS gives real-time visibility into operational data. While more cost-effective than a data warehouse, it uses outdated scaling technology, and performance upgrades require very specialized hardware. Plus, ODSs just can't handle the volume of data that has become a matter of fact for businesses today.

This white paper discusses the concept of the operational data lake, and its potential as an on-ramp to big data by upgrading outdated ODSs. Companies that are building a use case for big data, or those considering an upgrade to their ODS, may benefit from this stepping stone. With a Hadoop relational database management system (RDBMS), companies can expand their big data practices at their own pace. Read More

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